Cannot select text with mouse in Microsoft Word, fix.

A friend had the following problem with their laptop the other day. When they open Microsoft Word they cannot select any text with the mouse, they couldn't even place the cursor into the text by clicking the mouse on the text.

She said that the situation seemed to have occured when Norton Antivirus requested an update at the same time she was doing something in Word.

I suspected that it was that Word had somehow got corrupted, so I ran a repair, by inserting her Microsoft Office DVD and bring up the installer, and selecting Repair.

This made no difference, I then reinstalled Office, still the problem persisted. This made me think that the problem was related to the Registry, so I did a Google search.

Fixing Word text selection

I found these articles:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921541 which describes how to troubleshoot problems with Microsoft Word 2007/2003/2002. (Really I'm not impressed it just stinks of shoddy programming.)
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/39390-cant-select-text-word-2007-vista.html

To summarise the fix:

Backup the Word\Data part of the Registry first
delete the the Word\Data section
restart Word
if it works then its completed, else restore the backup and keep Google searching.

Warning about Word registry changes

This fix involves removing the Word/Data registry key. By deleting this key you will loose some options you have set, this just means that you will need to reset them again. Additionally you will loose the list of files in your recently used files list at the bottom of the file menu.

Additionally be really careful about deleting anything out of the registry, because it can cause serious problems. All the main Windows programs use it, and you could end up reinstalling everything including your copy of Windows.

Backup the offending part of your computer's registry:

Exit all Office programs, Word, Excel, Outlook etc if they are running.
Open regedit by: Clicking Start/Run, then type regedit, and select OK.
Navigate the registry and select the appropriate Word registry subkey:
- Word 2002:
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft Office\10.0\Word\Data
- Word 2003:
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft Office\11.0\Word\Data
- Word 2007:
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
Select the Data node, then from the File menu choose Export.
Name this backup file something like word_data.reg, and save it your desktop.

Delete the Word\Data registry node

Select the appropriate Word\Data node mentioned in part 3.
From the Edit menu select Delete, and then click Yes.
Exit regedit.

Restart Word

Restart Word. This will cause Word to recreate this registry node, but you may have to re-enter some of your Word options. If everything is working as expected you can finish. If you still have a problem follow the next section.

Restore the backed up registry node

If the problem still persists then restore your registry back, and keep looking for a solution. To restore the registry back to normal simply:

Double-click the word_data.reg file on your desktop.
and select Yes, and then OK.

Ben Emson